Carrier recovery systems are essential to quadrature amplitude modulated (QAM) modems to correct for various signal impairments, such as phase jitter. The latter impairment is typically modeled as a set of sinusoids and is mainly due to power line harmonics and ringing voltages. Adaptive techniques employed to correct for phase jitter include so-called finite-impulse-response (FIR) filter structures. One such FIR filter structure arranged to correct for phase jitter in a modem is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,320,526 issued Mar. 16, 1982 to R. D. Gitlin. Disadvantageously, an FIR filter structure is relatively slow in converging on the frequency of interest and does not substantially attenuate phase jitter when it is present in a received signal.